President Trump and Big Tech companies have never really gotten along. But the president’s conflict with Silicon Valley escalated Tuesday evening when Twitter appended a “fact-check” with additional information to two of his tweets speculating about election fraud and mail-in ballots.
“Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 election,” Trump tweeted in a furious backlash. “They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post. Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!”
BREAKING: For the first time, Twitter labels ‘fact-check’ notifications on tweets from President Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/O9XQ8usgtB
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 26, 2020
While Twitter is hardly censoring Trump — he did react by bashing the social media company publicly in more tweets, after all — its foray into “fact-checking” statements from political figures posted to the platform sets a troubling precedent indeed.
For one, it’s hard to see why anyone, regardless of his or her political persuasion, ought to trust Twitter employees to serve as some sort of unbiased referee and arbiter of the “truth.”
Like most Big Tech companies, Twitter is overwhelmingly staffed with Democrats and liberals. According to OpenSecrets.org, 99.8% of 2020 election donations made from individuals affiliated with Twitter have gone to Democrats. So it’s hardly surprising to see wild examples emerge such as Twitter’s head of site integrity, which is responsible for rule enforcement, being exposed for tweeting that Trump officials are “actual Nazis” and calling Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a “personality-free bag of farts.”
This person is the “head of site integrity” at Twitter pic.twitter.com/hyZcl5VIe0
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) May 27, 2020
It’s just unreasonable for us to rely on these people to “fact-check” politically controversial statements posted to Twitter’s platform. Even if it tries to be fair, and I’m willing to assume it would, unconscious bias will push almost all its errors, missteps, and blind spots against right-of-center figures.
Likewise, how can Twitter “fact-check” statements consistently?
Congrats @Twitter! From here on out if you DON’T comment on a prominent leaders tweet you are conveying that it is then true
I am really looking forward to all the fact checks on senior officials of the People’s Republic Of China https://t.co/p3Eddh08Cr
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) May 27, 2020
It’s odd that Twitter has singled out for “fact-checking” a controversial Trump tweet on elections but not his tweets pushing the blatantly false conspiracy that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough killed a former staffer. And why does Trump get the focus? Twitter allows Iranian regime officials and Chinese Communist Party propagandists to spew disinformation at will on its platform.
If it’s going to start policing Trump’s feed, it must do so equally to everyone from Joe Biden to Xi Jinping. Given the total infeasibility of this feat, the only way to be fair is to not “fact check” posts at all — and leave that to, well, fact-checkers and journalists, not technology company employees. At some point, technology elites will have to trust in the ability of everyday people to sort fact from fiction on their own.
With this latest venture into political interference, Twitter is wandering into dangerous territory. Its inevitably one-sided attempts at fact-checking will only escalate the animosity toward Big Tech companies and, unfortunately, will likely push populists even more toward regulating Silicon Valley’s innovation out of existence.
